A Jubilee Year to remember
Editorial
It’s been a big year for the Catholic Church. First we had the admission to hospital of Pope Francis on Valentine’s Day and daily reports on social media of his condition until he was discharged after 38 days.
He somehow managed to make public appearances over Easter, including meeting with prisoners on Holy Thursday – a tradition he began as soon as he took office – before the announcement came that he had died at 7.35am on Easter Monday April 21. It shouldn’t have been a shock, but it was.
Then the conclave began and the eyes of the world were fixed on Rome where the cardinals met in the Sistine Chapel to elect a new pope. As the crowds gathered in St Peter’s Square to wait for the white smoke to rise from the chimney, the interest created by the movie Conclave took the media frenzy and people’s fascination with this ancient tradition to new heights.
As if there wasn’t enough excitement and speculation about who would be the next successor to St Peter, the election of the first American pontiff put the Catholic Church front and centre in the western world.
The backdrop to these momentous events was the Jubilee Year of Hope, held every quarter of a century, which attracted approximately 25 million pilgrims to the eternal city.
In August Pope Leo XIV addressed the largest crowd of his pontificate on the outskirts of Rome where more than 1 million young people from 146 countries attended the closing Mass for the Jubilee of Youth.
Here in Australia the Jubilee Year and its theme of Pilgrims of Hope caught the imagination of many Catholics. For those who couldn’t make the pilgrimage to Rome, there were ample opportunities to participate in journeys to local pilgrimage sites. In South Australia we saw numerous parishes organise trips to the three designated sacred sites of Sevenhill, Penola and St Francis Xavier’s Cathedral.
The canonisation in September of the first millennial saint, Carlo Acutis, who died at the age of 15 in 2006, was lauded for providing youth with a relatable role model who used technology to spread the faith.
Another historic event was added to the universal Church’s yearbook when on October 23 Pope Leo prayed side by side with King Charles III in the Sistine Chapel – the first time a pope has prayed with a British monarch since the Church of England split from Rome in the 16th century.
This was followed by the Pope’s first foreign trip – to Turkey, where in Istanbul the minority Christians could fit into one Cathedral, and to Lebanon just a week after an air strike by Israel on Beirut.
Maintaining his focus on interfaith relations, Pope Leo paid tribute to Lebanon’s history of coexistence among people of different faiths, saying it was a place where “minarets and church bell towers stand side by side, yet both reach skyward”.
On the flight back to Rome from Beirut the first pope from the Order of St Augustine told journalists he was interested in visiting Africa, in particular Algeria where St Augustine was born, but also to continue the dialogue between Christians and Muslims.
In a fractured world, the Catholic Church’s role in promoting respect and fraternity has never been more important.
When Pope Francis opened the Holy Doors at the beginning of the Jubilee Year, he picked up on the theme of hope and recalled the Gospel passage: ‘I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord’ (Lk 2:10-11).
Prophetically perhaps, he also cited St Augustine’s proposition that ‘hope calls us to be upset with things that are wrong and to find the courage to change them’. Pope Leo bookended this when he said the motto of the Jubilee Year called us to ‘journey in hope throughout our lives and wait, not with our hands in our pockets but by actively taking part’.
The Jubilee Year might be nearly over, but there is no reason why we can’t continue to be pilgrims of hope by doing what we can to foster compassion and mutual respect in our own communities.
Wishing our readers a happy, peaceful and hope-filled Christmas and New Year.
